Caris Life Sciences partners with Merck KGaA on ADCs

In what has already been a busy week in the antibody-drug conjugates (ADC) deal-making sector, German pharma and life science major Merck KGaA (MRK: DE) has entered into a collaboration with Texas, USA-based Caris Discovery, the therapeutic research arm of Caris Life Sciences, an artificial intelligence (AI) techbio company and precision medicine pioneer.

"We are thrilled to join forces with Merck KGaA, Darmstadt, Germany, to discover targets with the first-in-class potential to advance the next wave of transformational ADC therapeutics," said Brian Lamon, chief business officer of Caris. "This partnership adds to our portfolio of external pipeline programs and is a strong validation of our highly differentiated, orthogonal multi-omics approach to discovering truly novel targets that may be harnessed to eradicate tumors,” he explained.

Deal worth up to $1.4 billion